


only happy when it rains

by parishilton



Category: Youtube RPF
Genre: Bad Weather, Craigslist, M/M, Magical Realism, Psychic Abilities, Sexual Repression, Storm Chasing, Urban Legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2019-11-28 07:50:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18205601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parishilton/pseuds/parishilton
Summary: jack watches felix shift slightly in one of their kitchen chairs, looking marginally less composed than usual. “there’s a word for it, but i don’t remember it. some people who are dissatisfied with their lives subconsciously want to be struck by disaster. if they feel trapped by routine or social convention, they might think they’d be relieved from obligation if everything was taken from them. it’s sort of likefight club, right?it’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.”“if you’re aiming for a movie she’s actually seen,” jack says, wanting to break the tension, “i’d suggestgone with the windorcasablanca.”“of all thecraiglistads in all of the forums, in all of the site, and he clicks onto mine,” felix says, looking despairingly off into the distance and squinting his eyes like he's remembering a time when jack broke his heart. jack would roll his eyes if felix were actually looking at him.





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> only happy when it rains / garbage.
> 
> this is an au where felix is still a youtuber, but films satirical documentary-style videos on urban legends and conspiracies. his videos are supposed to be a joke, but his audience is too stupid to realize. jack is a midwesterner who hates his town and decides to help felix with his latest documentary.
> 
> all the locations are real, but the urban legends and the townspeople are not.

_kearney,_ nebraska. it’s his last night in modernized civilization before the trek towards _burwell_. it’s less than a two hour drive remaining, but he’s too tired to keep going unless he wants to wrap himself around a tree. he’s been driving for so long that his eyes cross every time he blinks.

he meets a crowd of college-aged kids at a pub near the _university of nebraska_ who ask why he wouldn’t go to _omaha_ for his spring break instead. felix never tells them that he  _lives_ in _omaha_. they tell him that there are great irish pubs in _omaha_ , due to the irish immigrants that came to _omaha_ early in the city’s history, not like the one they’re sitting in that has been commercialized to death by flyers with colorful imagery that advertise _apps and zerts_ more than they do beer.

he drives past a small tourist trap area near the hotel he’s set to stay in. there’s a strip of restaurants and shops occupying a block or so in town where felix drives past a sign that catches his eye. _“honestly, it’s not for everyone”_ is the slogan the people of nebraska have _chosen_ to present to the world, as though they were advising passing visitors to keep on going and not stop. the land becomes desolate some time after that - just dirt roads that kick up clouds of dust under felix’s tires. depending on how long he stays in town and how much driving he does, his engine will need to be looked at when he gets back to the city. the worst part of storm-chasing wasn’t being in danger, since it happened so rarely. when he tells people that car troubles were the worst part of storm-chasing, they often laughed and thought he was kidding. people almost never died storm-chasing. it wasn’t a daredevil’s sport as it was suggested to be in the movies.

before he started narrowing down the focus of his videos to urban legends, felix’s following online was small and mostly contained to science nerds who just wanted to see videos of thunderstorms. now, he held fanatics and conspiracy theorists by the balls, and there were no shortage of fanatics on the internet. he’d sold out. there wasn’t any money to be made trying to sell _hd_ photos of lightning storms to science textbook publishers and local news channels. that was the excuse he would use, anyway, when someone in his family would ask why he wasted so much time driving around looking for monsters he didn’t even believe in.

felix pulls out his vlogging camera and pans around his hotel room. back before he sold out, he would usually crash with random college kids, in off-campus housing. he’d sleep on _ikea_ sofa-beds that were at least six inches short for his frame, his feet hanging off the edge, and eat _cinnamon toast crunch_ with them in the morning. now he has enough money to book hotels - which didn’t help him much when it came to the _bumfuck, nowheresville_ towns he often went to which didn’t even _have_ hotel chains. he plans to take an extra long shower in the morning before hitting the road again. motel showers in neglected towns were often just as neglected, with outdated nineteen-sixties orange or pink tiles and next to no water pressure.

* * *

_burwell,_ nebraska. so far he’d seen more cattle than people. he passes several ranches on his way to the motel. the road his motel is on also has a church, a bar, a laundromat, and a gas station. behind the gas station seems to be a stack of monster-truck tires. felix wonders if anybody in town will offer to take him off-roading. he supposes that depends on how his candid interviews go and whether or not people are receptive to being filmed. usually the people in the smallest towns were the kindest about being filmed, especially the older folks who had no concept of felix’s platform. occasionally, he would have to blur faces if somebody got worried that their mother wouldn’t be too happy that they retold a stranger the story of her apparent sighting of the _jersey devil_ or some other creature which couldn’t possibly have existed to begin with.

he’s already interviewed a handful of guys at a tiny bar near his hotel who were happy to accept felix’s offer of buying them a pitcher of beer in exchange for helping him with his documentary. they summarize what felix already knows: the _calamus reservoir_ is said to hold psychic energy in it’s waters. there were old wives’ tales about women who all got pregnant around the same time in order to have water births there in numbers significant to occult practice. the land is protected by the national parks, so it’s not like other locations felix sometimes investigates where he has to sneak into abandoned locations with flashlights in the dead of night.

people took sailboats out there and let their kids build sand castles there with plastic molds. the pictures online made it look like any photos he’d take there would come out like postcard images - nuclear families with bumbling children sitting in the sand with popsicles. any ties to witchcraft or occultism were either a thing of the past or had never taken place, been born out of overactive imaginations from bored locals. felix relished that the location would be easy to film in, but dreaded the editing process where he would have to make yet another harmless spot seem terrifying.

the footage from the previous night at the bar is slightly grainy. felix doesn’t mess with the depth of field during his interviews because the film comes out looking too polished and professional. the irony of saving up to afford cameras and camera equipment that could enhance even the shittiest lighting situations only to ignore those features wasn’t lost on him. he’d experimented a few times with better setups and his viewers had accused him of trying to attract attention from big corporations like _netflix_ or even cable networks. their fears had no basis in reality, but his audience liked to be reminded that felix was a lone wolf - they wanted him to project an authenticity that didn’t grant him the luxury of even hiring another cameraman. they also thought if he brought anybody else into the production elements of the documentaries that it would influence felix’s integrity where the conspiracies came in. felix enjoys laughing at the idea that there's any integrity in his videos to _lose_ almost as much as he enjoys laughing at the locals' ridiculous stories when it came time to interview them, enjoys himself enough to keep doing this shit for at least another ten years.

felix makes a few enemies on day three when he’s running out of options with the few locations on the street his motel is on and catches the ladies leaving church in their sunday’s best. one woman has left her friends in order to light up a cigarette and sit by herself on the bench outside the church doors. despite the cigarette, she looks as prim and as proper as a teacup on a doily. felix already knows the approach he’ll need to take. he wouldn’t bombard her with questions like he could do with the drunken men at the bar by his motel, so he’d start off with innocuous questions about something completely unrelated.

“excuse me, ma’am,” felix says as curtly as possible, “i completely understand if you’d prefer not to, but i’m a documentary-maker, and i was wondering if i could ask you a few questions about the local rodeo. do you mind?”

“no,” she says, but it sounds like a _yes_. she runs her hands over the skirt of her vintage dress to smooth out the wrinkles while the cigarette hangs limply out of the corner of her raspberry-colored lips. she brings one hand back up to take the cigarette out of her mouth and flicks the ashes down at the dirt next to her kitten heel. “you’re making a documentary on the garfield county rodeo?”

felix nods. “it’s a case study on small town tourism.” he busies himself with setting up his tripod and uncovering the lens to his camera.

she looks at him oddly. “well, you’re in the right place, stranger. they’re asking more and more of college kids these days, aren’t they?”

felix doesn’t tell her that it’s been several years since he’d dropped out of college. he’s lucky she’s even made the assumption that it’s a school project. he works on getting the woman and the bench centered in the frame as quickly as he can, already wanting this to be over with. it’s always a grueling process to be trying to interview a subject without letting them know your true intentions. if she _does_ end up incriminating the town’s reputation and asks to have her face blurred, at least his subscribers will enjoy the theatrics. “we’re rolling. first question: do you think the rodeo encourages unity within _burwell_?”

she offers a gentle smile. “you’re darn sure. half the town’s been preparing since last year’s rodeo and the other half are still recuperating. it’s a real privilege to live in a place where everyone’s so eager to help one another.”

“so, during the off-season for tourism, does the community still come together socially often?”

“every week we ladies meet at church,” she says, dropping her cigarette and stubbing it out with her shoe. “the men would go out fishing together every day if they could.”

“great,” felix says, hiding from behind his lens. “you know, that reminds me of some things some locals said about the _calamus reservoir_. that’s a good fishing spot, right?”

she nods. “it’s a great fishing spot, sure. my husband who passed, he taught my kid how to fish out there.”

“aren’t there urban legends about kids in relation to the reservoir?” felix asks, aiming for a nonchalant tone. “some guys at the bar around the corner said something about occultism.”

the woman purses her lips. “i don’t know if i’d be much help in that department. nobody’s brought up those things in twenty years. you probably weren’t even born yet the last time anybody hypothesized.”

“what do people hypothesize about?” felix asks.

“some silly folklore, i suppose.” she stands up, smoothing out her skirt once more, and only her body remains in felix’s camera frame. “nothing that should interest your documentary.”

felix looks up from his viewfinder in order to meet her eyes. her expression is still gentle, but her suggestion seems combative. he didn’t think she would start an argument with him in front of her church, in view of the other women were waiting for her by their cars parked out in the dirt, but he didn’t want to chance it either. if she expressed to other people in town that felix wasn’t to be trusted, he wouldn’t be able to get any other testimonies.

“i understand, ma’am. i’m sorry to take up your time.”

* * *

felix is going through the footage in his motel bed later that evening when the local weathergirl announces that there will be dry lightning the following day. dry lightning is beautiful to watch in action - the thin, bright sparks shooting down from the sky with no rain present to cause decreased visibility. taking pictures of or filming dry lightning _always_ comes out better than trying to capture the quick bolts shooting down in the midst of heavy rain. he downs several beers from the pack he’d bought at the gas station the previous day while he debates on who he could ask to accompany him.

whenever he’d asked guys he’d dated to accompany him to the rooftop of his apartment building during a thunderstorm, they would look at him like he was crazy. they didn’t want to get soaked in the rain or blown away by the strong gusts that felt even stronger that high up. sometimes they’d ask if felix _wanted_ to get struck by lightning and he would snort. the chances of being struck were astronomical, and even if you were unlucky enough to be struck, you wouldn’t necessarily die from it.

felix would bet that the locals here weren't afraid of these storms the way his city friends were. maybe somebody would drive out with him to watch the dry lightning. he certainly couldn’t ask any of the church-going ladies and, while he could ask the guys he’d met at the nearby bar, he would rather go with someone closer to him in age.

with a few empty beer cans at his side, felix goes on _craigslist_.

* * *

“sweetheart, pour me a glass of lemonade, would you?” jack’s mother asks from her usual spot at their kitchen table. there’s an empty glass in front of her. she’s sitting and flipping through an issue of _pottery barn_. jack usually likes to poke fun at her, tells her that nearest _pottery barn_ was at least two-hundred miles away, and they wouldn’t be caught dead delivering somewhere as isolated as _burwell_.

jack brings a pitcher of lemonade from their refrigerator over to the table and fills up her glass. “how was church? did sherri fall down drunk in the pew and show the priest her underwear again?”

she gives him a playful look with her reading glasses having slid down to the end of her nose. “you know she only turns to the liquor cabinet around christmas, dear. something interesting _did_ happen, though. a young man interviewed me. _me_ \- who's practically an old lady. the last time i was interviewed, it was to give a quote for sandra's obituary." 

“look at it this way,” jack says, sitting down across from her at their table, “you'll always be younger than everyone in the obituary section."

“brat." she rolls up her magazine and slaps him gently on the forearm with it. "a very rude young man from out of town tried to trick me into talking about _urban legends._ ”

she says the words _urban legends_ like they're curse words, and jack supposes they are. it’s taboo to bring up things like that even with close friends in _burwell_. the town was founded on religion and it's never come across anything easier to use as a manipulation tactic than faith. gossip is more of a currency in _burwell_ than actual money, so long as the gossip is contained to  _reasonable_ subjects. god only knows how the townsfolk considered the idea of talking snakes and enchanted fruit _reasonable,_ but they did. forget trying to bring up spooky stories about the occult with mixed company. jack hasn’t heard anybody comment on them since he was a kid.

“jesus, don’t city-folk have anything better to do to get their rocks off than come all the way out to the boonies and harass women at church?” he waits for her to answer, but she says nothing. “did he say where he was from?”

“ _no_ , jackie,” she sing-songs, the way you’d tell a toddler that, no, _elmer’s glue_ isn’t edible. “i didn’t ask the strange man where he was from.”

they’ve been arguing on-and-off for a solid year when it came to jack’s interest in life outside _burwell_. she’d never lived elsewhere and expected him to follow her in that path - to rekindle some nonexistent romance with a girl he might have gone to kindergarten with, to marry her, to have kids with her. when he thought about doing that, it gave him a horrible sense of dread and anxiety.

jack periodically checks  _craigslist_ looking for guys his age who are seeking roommates - but the nearest college was dozens of miles away and they had student housing. jack has only ever ran into a couple of ads posted by college guys looking for roommates off-campus and they're usually unappealing ads. there are no apartment complexes in  _burwell_ , only houses, and jack can't afford to buy one on his own, nor does he want to commit to that kind of responsibility. there are very few options for jack, especially with his current income.

he works as a part-time bartender down by the garfield county rodeo. they're currently one week away from the only time of the year they got any tourists, and the only time of the year where jack got good tips. not to mention, it's his only real chance to score with girls who he hadn't known since he was in diapers. girls from _omaha_ would come for the weekend and hit on jack to get free drinks. sometimes he’d take them back to his family’s barn and roll around in the hay with them for a night.

he’d had one serious girlfriend in his life, who had moved away after high school, but they used to browse _craigslist_ male-seeking-male ads for fun after school. she would sit behind him on the sofa, legs wrapped around jack’s waist, watching him scroll down the site with his laptop on the coffee table. she’d whisper in his ear that she’d love to see him _with_ a man like that. jack had eventually realized that she’d been segwaying towards asking him for a threesome after many bizarre comments on her part, so he'd broken up with her. his mother had been more upset to see her leave for college than jack had been.

nevertheless, the habit had stuck, and sometimes when he finished browsing the admittedly lackluster housing options, he would mosey over to the male-seeking-male section and read the ads for a laugh. usually they were seedy and hinted to extramarital affairs. never did he run into even one ad where the poster just wanted a simple date - not until that day.

there was a young guy who’d posted an ad looking for a date to go watch tomorrow’s dry lightning storm with. the guy’s post was a big, rambling mess. _don’t know anybody in town_ , it says, _and_   _it’d be nice to meet a guy_. jack thinks he must be in town for next weekend’s annual rodeo. he came a little earlier than most folks did, but maybe he didn’t realize how barren the town was. _show me to the best place for dinner in town and i’ll pay._

jack knows every kid he went to school with well - you could even say _too_ well. one of the drawbacks to having a town population of roughly a thousand people meant that classroom sizes were so small that if you so much as forgot to say _god bless you_ to someone who sneezed, everyone noticed and held it against you forever. the only kids who jack could feasibly ask for advice from about moving, who were out-of-state for college, were not kids jack had ever gotten along with. jack’s best friend, who works at the bar with him, has said he plans to grow old in _burwell_ , like there’s nothing more romantic than the idea of marrying within your own ten person graduating class in high school. jack doesn’t find anything romantic about the idea of coupling off with one of the four girls in his graduating class who used to tease him mercilessly in elementary school for always having his shirts buttoned wrong. call him heartless, but he’d rather not piss where he eats.

so, it’d be nice to pick someone’s brain who probably lives in _omaha_ , get a gauge on if moving there would be worth it. he’s not into guys, so it wouldn’t be a date. the only reason to go at all would be to ask this guy what it’s like being someplace so full of life and possibility. it’s not as though jack cares about _dry lightning_. it was par for the course in these parts, no stranger than seeing the sun rise or set. if anything, it was almost morbid to be so interested in being close to dry lightning. fires often started when the dust of the nebraska _sandhills_ met the lightning, and they proved hard to put out. he shouldn’t even respond to this guy.

he sends the message before he can change his mind.

* * *

jack isn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but he knows by his own intake of breath, which sounds foreign to his ears, that it wasn’t felix. weren’t gay guys supposed to be clean-cut, trendy, and speak with lilting, feminine voices?  

they make small-talk for a little bit, jack feeling envious when he learns that felix makes a living off of _youtube_. jack has a lot of free time to devote to the internet what with only being a bartender part-time and he knows enough of _youtube_ to know that it isn’t easy to make enough money doing it to afford to travel, like felix is doing. maybe he does loads of greed-driven sponsorships to make ends meet.

jack had suggested through _craigslist_ that they meet at the town diner for lunch, thinking it would read as less romantic than meeting for dinner, before driving out to the _sandhills_ to watch the dry lightning storm. the diner is fittingly retro, which is to say, just as outdated as everything else in _burwell_ , and therefore, the theme fell short. there was nothing about the nailed-up license plates, pictures of _betty boop_ , and framed, yellowing photographs of present and past diner employees that seem ironically retro. in order for _burwell’s_ diner to have _really_ seemed retro, they should have gone with a nineteen-twenties style prohibition whiskey-bar, not a fifties-style diner. the whole damned town was still stuck in the fifties.

felix sits on the side of the table that offers a red vinyl booth, leaving jack to sit on the less comfortable and less spacious red vinyl chair across from him. he seems to be wearing head-to-toe black, his jeans slashed at the knees. when he moves his arm to take a sip from his glass of water, his jacket opens wider and jack catches the word _heresy_ printed across his tee shirt. jack’s mother would hate that. he’s got a full beard like a lumberjack, lush and camera-ready, the kind of beard that makes jack wonder if _dollar shave club_ has ever reached out to sponsor him. he looks so wildly out of place here compared to the men in cowboy hats and the women in floral wrap dresses.

when he introduces himself, it’s with a masculine rasp that jack thinks most straight men would kill to have. it must be jealousy that makes jack hyperfocus on that, the idea of having the kind of voice that demanded authority. that’s what men want, isn’t it? jack sits down and realizes that he has little room for his feet from beneath the table. felix seems to be doing what jack’s ex-girlfriend had called “ _manspreading_ ” - his thighs spread almost indecently apart across the booth. anytime jack would forlornly agree to accompany his ex to church, she would compliment his painfully considerate posture. jack likes to take up as little space as possible in the pews, thighs pressed together like he’s a shoplifter trying to smuggle something out of a store between them.

felix sits as though he’s the only person in the entire restaurant, never-mind the table they’re sitting at. five minutes into meeting him and jack forgets that felix _isn’t_ the only person in the restaurant. he startles back when the waitress comes over and felix laughs at him with an endearing gruffness. he has the voice of an old man in his mid-twenties. jack wonders if felix’s voice is some kind of _benjamin button_ situation. maybe his voice would get higher and more delicate with age instead of gruffer, like most elderly men jack had known.

“he’ll have whatever milkshake you recommend,” felix says, snapping jack out of his thoughts. the waitress nods curtly and walks away. she’s a year younger than jack and her mother works at the bank over on _franklin._ jack wonders if she thinks felix is strange for ordering for jack, who is somewhat of a regular. jack isn’t as upset that felix has ordered a drink for him as he thinks he maybe ought to be. should he be standing up and beating his fists on his chest in a display of manliness to challenge felix’s control over the meal? if he doesn’t do some version of that, does that make this meeting a date?

“thanks, man,” jack says instead and tries not to think too hard on it. “your ad said you’re looking for someone to watch the dry lightning with.”

“yeah,” felix says agreeably, with jaunty eyebrows, “i’ve been looking for some eye-candy to show me around too.”

jack clears his throat. he hadn’t wanted to ask about that part of the ad, the part where it’d been listed under _men seeking men_. he supposes the ad had seemed like such a good opportunity to ask about city life that he’d decided to write off the gay implications of it. jack has always been a fan of the simplicity of male bonding, the shoulder-punches and dick jokes. he’s not sure yet if that method will lend itself to being felix’s friend or not, who seems like the type that would clobber you in the head for a shoulder-punch.  

“the rodeo is really the only thing worth showing,” he settles on, smiling weakly, though he’s starting to suspect felix wouldn’t bother coming to _burwell_ an entire week before the annual rodeo if that's all he's interested in. if he were here to maybe film it in action, he’d have come for the weekend _of_ the rodeo. “there’s not much else to show. if you take too many left turns, you’ll end up back where you started.”

“what you’re showing me now’s not bad,” felix says, the corner of his lip twitching.

jack’s not sure if felix means jack’s appearance or the diner, and he’s not sure he could handle finding out, so he doesn’t ask. jack feels dumb now for responding to the ad at all. jack’s never even considered responding to one before, not even when his ex-girlfriend had begged and pleaded with him, insisting that jack would look good with another man. jack could hardly fault felix for hitting on him when he probably assumes that jack was also searching for guys who were looking for male companionship. felix seems like he’d be a decent companion, anyway. _shit_ \- not _companion_. _friend_.

“full disclosure, man,” jack says regretfully, “i’m not into guys. maybe i shouldn’t have responded to the ad. i’ve been thinking of moving to _omaha_ for a while now and thought maybe you’d have some insight.” he watches as felix’s expression stays within the same measured, amused range. he’d sort of expected felix to become angry, though it’s stupid to assume so just because of felix’s appearance. “if i _were_ , you know,” jack says stupidly, “i’m sure you’d be ideal.”

felix’s face splits into a wide smile. “thanks, man. why don’t we hang out anyway?”

jack thinks about taking the easy way out and saying no, thinks about going back to his dad’s old barn alone and laying atop the old bales of hay in one of the converted horse stalls that now serves as jack’s hiding spot when he’s bored or lonely. felix is looking at him expectantly. he realizes he hasn’t answered felix’s question. “sure. so, this lightning fascination, what’s it about?”

felix presses his lips together into a thin line, like he’s unsure of how to explain. “it’s a part of storm-chasing. it’s something i’ve always been drawn to.”

“so you love natural disasters,” jack surmises. “you get off on death and destruction.” he knows he’s said the wrong thing when felix looks uncomfortably away from jack, eyes now trained on either a _wyoming_ license plate or a signed photo of _gerald ford_ that jack has always suspected was forged, depending on his line of sight. “sorry,” jack says finally, “i was raised to have better manners.”

felix looks at him skeptically. “do you usually censor yourself?”  

“you have to here, unless you want to be tarred and feathered.”

“storm-chasing is a milder fetish, don’t you think?”

with his face burning, jack nods. “supposing the storm is a willing participant.”

“course she is,” he says, “it’s humans who have no say. if she’s coming, i might as well be coming too.” felix grins and doesn’t look away from jack’s red face like anyone with manners might do, out of politeness. maybe jack was misguided in thinking he could steer felix into social niceties. “destruction is inevitable - being afraid is a choice.”

“you _would_ be old testament god’s hype-man,” jack says, thinking of the town priest, an old, judgemental man obsessed with the fire and brimstone tales that jack has never much liked. he’d provided both versions of the bible to jack’s fourth grade class to read from. nasty stuff, the lot of it. jack doesn’t see how anyone would be able to resonate with the threat of destruction, especially not someone claiming to be a heretic, as felix wears so proudly on his chest. if not to accept as god’s punishment for human sin, then for what? chaos for the sake of it?

jack frowns. “you want to see the world burn.”

“i want to see the world light up, not burn,” felix says, “but right now _burning_ is definitely the right word, because my entire comment section consists of flame wars between flat-earthers and rational people, or illuminati believers and _lady gaga_ fans who are angry that people think she’s in the illuminati.”

“the news of the earth being round hasn’t hit _burwell_ yet,” jack manages with a straight face, “we’re a few decades behind the rest of the country, so you’d do well asking people here their opinions on that if you’re looking for something out of an _snl_ skit.”

“you’re not angry that i’m here on a quest to demonize your town?”

“my family are celtic-christians,” jack says with a snort. “we demonize _ourselves_ by _believing_ in demons.”

“you have something against this country’s hard-working demons?” felix asks. “they have feelings too, jack.”

“you don’t believe in that shit,” jack scoffs.

“how can you tell?” felix asks, impressed, leaning in across the table on his elbows.

“by reading your shirt, you idiot.”

felix looks down at his shirt like he’s forgotten what he wore to meet jack. “you’ve caught me. it's become too easy to get testimonies from fanatics who swear up and down that they saw the loch ness monster down a storm drain. i needed a challenge, so i decided that asking bible-thumpers about the occult would be perfect. they might know it's improper to talk about, but they can't say that evil isn't _real_ \- it's in the bible. they _need_ evil to exist. without evil, how would we know what was good?"

jack finds himself struggling to keep a straight face. "you're so full of shit. how do people actually believe you?" 

"we believe what we want to believe, jack." felix moves to lean against the back of the booth, bringing up his hands to fold them behind his head. now that jack can sense felix's sarcasm, he sees it in everything felix does. he would guess that felix's smugness is more for jack's benefit, to make him laugh, than that felix actually has an ego problem. "they believe what i tell them to believe. my documentary is on the _calamus reservoir_. you live here, so you get to tell _me_ what to believe." 

“gee, that's big of you,” jack says, rolling his eyes, “but i wasn’t even born yet when that shit supposedly happened. i know what _you_ need. you need the oldest geezer in town - the priest.”

felix balks, dropping his arms along with his act. “are you offering to help me with my investigation?”

shrugging, jack crosses one leg over the other from underneath their table, his foot grazing felix’s knee. “i’ve got nothing better to do.”

* * *

felix disconnects his phone from his car’s bluetooth and gestures towards jack’s phone. “play us something while we drive? who knows how long we’ll be parked out in the sand for.”

jack nods as felix turns the ignition on and begins scrolling through his phone, whether through a playlist he’s curated, or for something in particular, felix doesn’t know.

_“i’m only happy when it rains,”_ shirley manson croons from felix’s shitty car speakers. there’s a slight fuzz that comes from felix abusing the bass setting too often, making even the most upbeat songs sound a little unsettling, and this one was not especially upbeat to begin with. _“you know i love it when the news is bad,”_ she continues, taunting felix.

“you’re a little shit, aren’t you?” felix asks, biting his lip. “i bet you get away with murder here. i bet nobody looks at you and suspects your love of mischief. people look at me and they just _know_. how’s that fair?”

jack just laughs, a small body with a big boom of a laugh like a crack of thunder, curled up with his legs pressed to his chest and his arms wrapped around them like he’d been afraid felix wouldn’t find it funny. it’s hopelessly endearing. felix thinks if he knew jack a little better, he would unwrap jack’s arms from his death-grip on himself, and wrap them around felix’s neck, press a kiss to his temple. instead, felix takes his vlogging camera out and aims it out the windshield, waits for the sparks in the sky to distract him from his sparks with jack.

* * *

“have you been to any haunted locations that seemed as innocent as the reservoir?” the priest asks.

“not many,” felix answers truthfully, “and none that were protected by the national parks. it’s not one of my more spine-chilling investigations.” felix chuckles. “i’m not expecting to find much. after all these years, i’d expect it’d be hard for anyone who was around back then to come forward. everyone in town seems like they’d rather avoid the subject.”

the priest does not take felix’s bait about him likely having been around during the days when the scandal began. he's certainly old enough to have been at least felix’s age at the time. one would think it’d been the talk of the town, but felix isn’t surprised that he’s being close-mouthed. his position in town did not likely allow for being a gossip. he couldn’t speak his mind as openly as the grocers, hairdressers, and mechanics felix usually wound up interviewing in small towns. “yes, it would certainly make canoeing and sailing kites in the area less pleasant,” the priest says with just a hint of a smile.

“was it always such a popular place to hang out?” felix asks curiously.

“yes,” the priest says, taking off his glasses in order to rub the bottom of his shirt with them. “even in the evenings, the reservoir is never really unoccupied. teenagers have been going there to have bonfires and camp for years. the idea of such rituals taking place under our noses, even that many years ago, is improbable.”

“improbable, but not impossible?” felix presses.

the priest sighs and places his glasses back onto his nose. “i don’t like to sensationalize - it accomplishes nothing.”

“forgive me, priest,” jack says gently, leaning forward slightly and using what felix could only describe as a brown-noser tone, “but these stories were before my time. i was just wondering what people thought the river could _do_.”

felix watches the priest’s posture shift closer to accommodate jack, seeming to respond better to jack’s approach than felix’s. felix can’t be sure if that’s because the priest may know of jack and his mother, and his mother’s frequent church attendance, and felt he could trust jack’s intentions, or if he just liked being spoken to as though his opinion were fact. it would certainly make sense, considering his profession. still, jack speaks to his priest like he’s just a little boy, vying for approval. on one hand, felix is glad it’s creating better content. on the other, he can’t stand to see jack act as though he isn’t worthy of someone’s time or attention.

“yes, it does seem strange to think that river could possess any sort of supernatural energy,” the priest says with a soft laugh, “but that’s what the general consensus seemed to be: that it would give the children born there psychic abilities if the ritual’s specifications were met.”

“psychic abilities?” jack asks. “why?”

“many cultures believe in the gift of foresight. in asian mythology, you might use the word _shaman_. in greek, _oracle_. in celtic, _vate_ , meaning _prophet_ or _seer_.”

“if you were a _seer_ ,” jack continues skeptically, like the word tastes funny in his mouth, “you’d see visions?”

“seers in mythology are often tied to someone they view as a personal hero and their visions are said to be tied to the fate of this person. the visions could be in a dreamstate or through guided meditation, depending on the customs of the people.”

felix knows they already have enough great soundbytes to where they could leave, which he thinks jack seems more than ready to do. felix has no idea if the priest actually believes in any of it, but it isn’t uncommon for felix to interview members of the clergy who have a vast prior knowledge of other culture's belief systems. if the priest were to theoretically boast that he believed in any of this shit, he would probably be run out of town by the pitchfork-wielding citizens of _burwell_. 

it’s hard for felix to imagine how jack might feel having grown up in this stifling environment - felix’s college had been more populated than jack’s entire hometown is. jack is sitting closer to felix than he was before, like he thinks that being in the oppressive company of the priest could be alleviated by getting closer to someone as nonconformist as felix. felix begins packing up his camera equipment for jack’s sake, nudging jack’s leg with his knee. he reaches over to shake the priest’s hand out of a moral obligation to show respect, though he doesn’t think respect is necessarily warranted.

“well, thank you for your time, priest,” jack says, seeming to busy his hands with clapping them against his own legs in order to avoid having to shake the man’s hand himself.

“good luck, boys,” the priest says, sending them on their way.

while walking away, jack begins giggling for seemingly no reason. when felix looks at him, quirking his lip, jack just becomes louder. “sorry, it’s just not often that his rants don’t end with him asking me to tip. can you imagine demanding a _second_ salary from the same taxpayers who already pay your _primary_ salary?”

felix snorts. “big fan of the collection bucket?”

“as a bartender who would like better tips, i admire the steel balls it must take to ask.”

“so _that’s_ why they’re celibate,” felix says, making a gun with his pointer finger and thumb and firing it off into the air. _“got ‘em.”_

jack just rolls his eyes and elbows felix as they walk back to his car, nearly falling right over when felix elbows back. felix chuckles and reaches around jack’s shoulder as an apology, rubs jack’s shoulder as if to warm him up, though the town has reached peak humidity for spring, and it isn't even cold enough to need a jacket. jack lets felix’s arm stay there until they get to the car.

“we got some pretty great stuff back there. what’d you think?” felix asks, crossing his arms over the roof of his car. he wants to ask jack if he basically took over for felix’s interview because he thought the priest would be more likely to answer him rather than felix, who was a stranger, or because he became genuinely interested.

jack grins as he rounds felix’s car. “i think i’m starting to get a raging clue right now,” he says with an effeminate speech affectation, and felix can see through the passenger side window that jack playfully lowers his hand like he’s adjusting himself through his jeans.

felix immediately picks up on jack’s _south park_ reference and tries not to let himself become too disappointed when he realizes it’s likely the only time he’ll ever get to see jack touch himself. “my subscribers are _all_ going to have raging clues when they see this shit.”

jack looks unimpressed. “i mean, come on - _dreamstates_.” jack makes a face. “who _hasn’t_ had dreams like that? it’s called deja vu.”

“so, you think everyone on earth is psychic?”

jack gets into felix’s car, scoffing. “you know what? maybe i do. it’s certainly more believable that we’re all living in a simulation like in _the matrix_ and seeing snippets of shit we’re not supposed to see than that a bunch of old biddies in town used to get in a circle every friday night and pray to satan for psychic kids.”

“okay, _area51andrew_.”

jack balks. “oh, fuck you. i’m not one of your subscribers, okay?”

“no, no!” felix cries, opening his car door and sliding into the driver’s side. “that was a great theory, _bushdid911brian_. you’re giving _me_ a massive clue right now. wanna see?”

“i hate you,” jack says, his face coloring.

* * *

the day after their interview with the town priest, where jack had found himself intrigued with the urban legends that had once only made him roll his eyes, felix suggests they take a day off from the investigation. jack would feel guilty for holding up felix’s investigation if he were less invested in the idea of felix extending his stay in _burwell_. felix says he still plans to vlog, since his subscribers have taken to jack so much. jack hasn't watched any of the videos felix has posted, but he assumes he's not in much of them himself. he thinks felix mentioned interviewing some middle-aged men at the bar by his motel, who may have been his only subjects until the priest. jack is too afraid of the reaction felix's fans will have to him to find out for himself what felix's videos are like, but felix tells jack that it’s highly unusual that his subscribers don’t complain when he tries to bring anybody new aboard.  

jack drops the subject and suggests getting lunch at an ice cream parlor in town that also has a lunch menu, though admittedly a very small one. it also has outdoor seating, under striped umbrellas. _so you can be in the rain, weirdo,_ jack texts, _and we still won’t get wet._

_you never want to take me to dinner, jack,_ felix texts him. _have you had deja vu where you asked me to dinner and i said no?_ then felix sends him a meme of a stock footage couple lying in bed. the woman is being spooned and thinking, _“i wonder if he’s dreaming of me”_ and the man is spooning her but thinking, _“i wonder if bigfoot is real.”_ when jack doesn’t reply, felix adds, _i’ll only say no to dinner if you become a conspiracy theorist like this_ _guy. even i’m not_ that _desperate for a date._

“big talk coming from the guy who had to beg for a date on _craigslist_ ,” jack says as he saunters into felix’s motel, not even bothering to knock on the door to announce his presence.

“big talk coming from the guy who replied to someone begging for a date on _craigslist_ ,” felix says from his spot on the unmade bed.

“bet you regret posting that ad now,” jack says as he grins at felix and plops down beside him. felix is sitting and untangling the cords to his camera chargers and looking mighty proud of himself, though he probably _does_ regret posting the ad. now he’s stuck with jack for good. jack is going to harass the shit out of him until the moment felix leaves town, and maybe even after that.

“no way.” felix is laughing with an evil glint to his eyes that jack would be willing to bet money on is an entirely unconscious gesture. he genuinely seems to get pleasure out of torturing jack. felix flips open the viewfinder, aiming his lens at jack. “that ad got me more than one response. you’re not special, kid,”  felix says, putting on a gruffer voice than usual and knocking back his can of _monster_ with mirth.

“you _are_ a monster,” jack says to felix’s camera.

felix snorts, his eyes never veering from the viewfinder. he’s said he gets immersed when doing handheld vlogging. that must be why he doesn’t make eye contact with jack while talking to him. jack's not sure why felix is filming the conversation to begin with, as it has nothing to do with the investigation. vlogging dry lightning storms to lengthen his videos was one thing - vlogging himself trying to make jack, well - “jealous?” felix asks, echoing jack's thoughts. 

“nope,” jack says, “since i’m your only field correspondent, i figure it must not have went well with those dudes.”

“just too busy to actually get around to leaving the motel,” felix says, and jack wants to lurch out of his spot on felix’s bed and leave the room. he’s picturing it, then, without meaning to. there’s some shadowy, faceless guy making out with felix on the same motel bed. it’s completely irrational - there’s no way felix is hooking up with guys in jack’s tiny, small-minded town. it’s irrational and yet - the shadowy, faceless figure gets his hands on felix’s beard and into his hair. the guy is crawling into felix’s lap and latching onto felix's mouth like he had an illness and felix's mouth was the antidote. they barely even get past an introduction after the guy shows up at felix’s motel room before they're hooking up. they definitely never get around to exploring the town, but not because they’re too busy bickering, like jack and felix do.

“get your shit, casanova,” jack says, trying to keep the edge out of his voice, “and let’s get going already.”

“what’s the rush?” felix asks, laughing. he must be privately congratulating himself for making jack squirm.

“we’re not going to get any footage of the rainbow if you don’t get your ass in the car right now.”

“what rainbow?”

jack just grins and picks up one of felix’s camera bags for him, thinking of the oldies song his mother used to sing along to in the kitchen whenever it’d come on the radio. _“i wanna know,”_ he belts out enthusiastically, “ _have you ever seen the rain coming down on a sunny day?”_

* * *

“oh, _there_ it is,” felix says, pointing to the rainbow that’s just formed in the distance, taking off his sunglasses so jack can see the full glory of his wickedness. “let’s chase it for the documentary. i could claim to have caught the first ever real leprechaun sighting on camera if you’ll just put on a green dress and do a jig for me.” he reaches out to playfully poke at jack’s nipple from over his shirt.

“fuck you,” jack says while grinning maddeningly and twisting away from felix’s hand. “do you know how much money it’d take for me to put on a dress in a town like _this_?”

“i’ll take the adsense money and you can take the pot of gold.”

“eat your lunch already,” jack says without any heat, “dick.”  

jack’s eyes are scrunched up as he smiles, making him look more like a huggable teddy bear than a grown man. though felix had thought jack was quiet and reserved when he'd met him at the diner, he knows now that jack is definitely neither of those things. he has the kind of laugh that fills up a room, the kind of laugh that someone would assume came from a very large man if they'd heard it without seeing jack. he laughs like he’s making up for lost time, like felix is the only person to have made him laugh in months, and he can tell that jack sometimes startles himself when he realizes how loud he’s being.

felix has always been a bit of a jerk, has always enjoyed embarrassing people in public, but this is different. he doesn’t want everyone staring at jack because felix has stuck out his foot and tripped him, like felix does with his friends in the city. he wants people to look over at jack and see how happy he is, see the way he tries to cover his mouth to muffle his laughter and only succeeds in being louder, and for complete strangers to hate them for how obnoxious they are.

felix meets the eyes of a scowling older man sitting at the table behind jack and he grins at him, can’t even try to hide how infectious jack’s laughter is, doesn’t even care to try. he’s so proud of himself for making jack laugh so openly and honestly that it feels just as good as getting scowled at does. there’s just something about pissing people off that makes felix feel lighter, or maybe it’s just being with jack.

back at the motel that night, felix is excited to read the comment section of the latest video in the reservoir series, knowing that it’s the first addition to the series since felix’s audience has warmed up to jack. he doesn’t usually click on his own videos this late - doesn’t usually have jack on his mind this late either. felix scrolls up and away from the comments at the sound of jack’s laugh and watches jack’s crinkly-eyed smile form as the rainbow does behind him. jack throws his whole body into his laugh, leaning backwards with his head tipped back. when he leans forward again, he has to brush his bangs out of his eyes. felix thinks he was definitely right in making this image, of jack smiling so brightly with the rainbow behind him, the thumbnail. 

thinking of jack while felix is so close to the edge of sleep is distracting him from his attempt at reading the comments. he wonders if it’s weird to imagine jack in this motel bed with him, looking over his shoulder at his laptop, and tucking his chin there. felix feels a little bad for thinking of jack so intimately without his knowledge, but when he’s half asleep, he cares even less for social niceties than he normally does. he can’t argue with the way his brain shuts off all reasoning when it’s this tired and chooses to fixate on something comforting, which is apparently the thought of jack curled up on his chest like a teddy bear. he groans at his own lack of imagination and mutes the video so he can go back to looking over the comments without being torn away from them by wanting to watch the clip of himself making jack laugh. 

_jack is psychic, he predicted the rainbow would appear. thumbs up so felix sees!_

_lol does felix not think it’s weird that jack knew that rainbow would happen? maybe he’s an oracle._

it _would_ figure that the same fans of felix’s documentaries that believe harmless patches of water could have been the site for occult practice would also accuse jack of being some kind of mythical being. the thought makes felix laugh more than anything else. jack had predicted a rainbow after it’d rained - _anybody_ could do that. felix is a little disappointed that his audience was so quick to jump to conclusions over something anyone with elementary knowledge of weather patterns could have also predicted. what does it say about felix that his fans are _that_ stupid? god, he wishes storm-chasing could sustain him enough to where he doesn't feel obligated to entertain their ludicrous theories to make money. now, he’s going to have to pay even closer attention to jack where the weather is concerned, try to maybe hack together some piss-poor segment about jack being psychic. at least jack will have something else to laugh about, so felix doesn’t have to resort to tweaking jack’s nipples in public to get him to laugh. felix looks back to the comment section.

_jack’s laugh omg rip headphone users_

_when’s the last time felix vlogged so much during an investigation? we are getting spoiled._

_anybody else hope jack is in ALL the videos in this series?_

the last one has been thumbs-upped the most out of all the comments. felix falls asleep wondering if they like jack so much because they’re seeing him through felix’s lens and felix’s eyes.


	2. two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lachesism: n. the desire to be struck by disaster — to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall — which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life.

jack is on edge for more than one reason the day he plans on introducing felix to his mother and stepfather. he'd had a whole slew of strange dreams the night before - including one where felix had showed up at his house wearing his shirt that said _heresy_ across the chest and jack’s mother had slapped felix across the face - which had actually been his _less_ dramatic dream. he’d also dreamed that he and felix had been driving in the pouring rain and their car had hydroplaned, sending them straight for a tree.

“please tell me you didn’t dress like someone who burns down churches for fun,” jack pleads, standing outside his house with felix. he looks over felix’s attire and it’s entirely inoffensive nature - a black bomber jacket and dark jeans. _thank god._ at least now he can tell felix to shut up about deja vu - it’s not something jack thinks is worth investigating. jack’s dreams are no more prophetic than anyone else’s. dreaming about a rainbow the day before he and felix had seen a rainbow didn’t mean shit - rainbows _always_ happen once the sun comes back out after it rains.

“how do they feel about biting off the heads of bats?” felix asks, clearing fucking with him.

jack glares.

“don't worry - i left my ' _craft beer is better than jesus'_ shirt in my suitcase.”

“why do i genuinely believe you own that?” jack mutters under his breath as he opens the front door to his house and lets felix in. jack makes a noise of pure, carnal fear when he sees his mother flipping through a magazine at their kitchen table. he lowers his voice and says, “don’t tell her about your documentaries, okay?”

“shit,” felix says loudly, directly to jack’s mother’s face.

jack looks at him questioningly. he watches as his mother looks up, and jack swears her eye twitches when she sees felix. jack frowns and looks immediately back over to felix, half-expecting him to have unzipped his jacket to reveal a shirt that depicts jesus’ crucifixion, or something. “ma, this is my friend felix.”

she looks between the two of them and places the magazine down carefully. “that’s nice, honey. do you remember when i said a rude man from out of town tried to trick me into talking about the occult for his documentary?”

jack is horrified. “oh my god.” he raises both hands to scrub them over his face, using them to shield his eyes from having to watch what was sure to be the worst storm felix has ever chased down. when he drops his hands, he sees that his stepfather, jim, has entered the room and is now leaning against the kitchen counter.

“everything alright, trish?” he asks, still standing close to the doorway, like he’d rather just leave, but thinks he should make sure his wife isn't being harassed by a strange man first.

jack’s mother looks over to slim like she can't possibly imagine how he would help. for as long as jack has known slim, slim has always said what he  _thinks_ jack’s mother wants him to say. if she claimed the mechanic across town overcharged, slim would agree, but wouldn't dare to ask the mechanic to lower the bill. jack suspects that if she asked slim to escort felix out, slim would just stand there awkwardly. “ _yes_ , slim,” jack’s mother says rather dismissively. jack is impressed, though he's used to her personality overpowering his.

“like a samurai,” felix says, looking deathly serious, and jack is already concerned to see where this is going, “i will fall on my sword to avoid further shame.”

“that won’t be necessary,” jack says, wondering if felix also has a sword in his suitcase. “ _right_ , ma?”

“i’m your mother,” she says, and smiles at him. “it’s my job to tease your friends, though i still don’t understand why he’s so interested in the reservoir.”

“i’m not, really,” felix admits. “my investigations are performative, like reality tv. i take people's stupid, implausible stories and edit them to seem more believable. it's like _keeping up with kardashians_ , with even worse dialogue." 

she raises a perfectly-plucked eyebrow. “how did you come upon a job like that?"

he offers an embarrassed smile. “i wanted to be a weatherman when i was a kid - my parents said i'd ask them to switch from cartoons back to the news whenever they'd try to get me interested in children's shows. even in high school, i thought being able to predict weather patterns was so interesting. it hadn't occurred to me that the weathermen weren't really responsible for those findings, that they were just television personalities. in college, that realization left me feeling pretty aimless. i wanted to have more say in the programming. i didn't want to put on a suit and read teleprompters all day. i dropped out when i realized i preferred to be behind the camera and i started storm-chasing after i heard about a tornado in kansas. i went down there with some shitty cameras and started interviewing people who'd lost their homes. after uploading the first couple videos in that series, people started asking how they could help. i ended up starting a fundraiser that did pretty well."

jack is - well, needless to say, he's surprised. it's not that he thinks felix wouldn't be willing to help the less fortunate exactly. maybe he's been assuming felix is more of a cynic than he really is, that he'd be more morbidly interested in the carnage that storms leave behind than the people who lose their homes and all of their possessions to them. it's hard to imagine felix being anything _other_ than cynical, but maybe that's because he's unhappy with his current job, and has become more disillusioned with people the more they disappoint him with baseless stories. "so, where do the goatman and mothman come in?" 

"i interviewed a lot of witnesses to the tornado," felix says, looking like he's dreading what he's about to say, "but there was one woman who everyone online became obsessed with. she was convinced that she'd caused the tornado, through witchcraft. she'd joined a coven and hadn't agreed with their specific practices, but had been too afraid to leave the group. of course, she was just panicking over nothing, but her anxiety seemed genuine. out of a dozen interviews, the one people latched onto was the only one i included to bring a little levity and humor into the series, which had been pretty bleak up until then." felix stops to look out jack's kitchen window distractedly, poking out his cheek with his tongue. "part of me has always regretted including her testimony, even if it'd mean i'd be destitute now," he says with a tired grin. 

“what a departure that must have been for you,” jack's mother says gently, "going from one thing to something else that's so different." 

felix shrugs. "i try to time all my investigations to coincide with the location’s highest annual rainfall and thunderstorm potential. it’s where my interests still are and it keeps me more invested in my projects, even if i can't incorporate my findings anymore. you ever seen a tornado around these parts?” he asks curiously.

“yes,” she says. “deadly things tornados are. my father took me on a trip to _south dakota_ when we heard it was coming our way. we saw  _mount rushmore_. those faces are beautiful, carved into the stone like that. it was a nice little vacation, until we got back, and found my mother's house completely demolished. everywhere you turned on our street, there were knocked-over mailboxes, flattened cabinets full of smashed plates and teapots, and upturned cars with no windshields. the gusts had blown our house over faster than you could say  _gerald ford_."

“i’m sorry, ma’am.” felix cringes. “i don’t mean to be insensitive.”

“call me patricia,” she says with a smile, “or trish.” she points to jack’s stepfather. “that’s jim, but we call him slim.” slim raises a hand, the closest he ever gets to acknowledging company even on a good day, and leaves the room. “sit down, felix. have some lemonade.”

she pushes the pitcher towards felix, and jack feels his shoulders loosen and his back unclench, not realizing how rigidly he’d been standing. maybe everything _would_ actually work out, despite the bad first impression felix had clearly made at the church.

“you never said that happened to your grandmother,” felix directs towards jack, frowning.

“maybe i did and you couldn’t hear it from behind your massive beard. can you even smell through that thing, chewbacca?”

“jack!” his mother cries out, placing her glass onto her magazine to act as a coaster. “stop terrorizing your guest. you’re not a very good host.”

jack rolls his eyes, knowing felix isn’t going to be offended before he even glances his way. he thinks felix must have much worse insults thrown his way online by people who  _actually_ dislike him, while jack simply enjoys verbal sparring.

“can smell your bullshit just fine,” felix says, grinning.

“i’ll pretend i didn’t hear that,” jack’s mother says with a soft smile on her face. “jack, tell your guest about your grandmother.”

“what’s to tell?” jack looks to felix. “everything you would need to know about her is implied by her status as a grandmother. she loves knitting, playing bingo, and bought me  _beanie babies_ well into my twenties. when you’re that old, everyone under the age of thirty is practically a toddler to you.” jack can feel his mother’s dissatisfaction with his description, so he turns back to her. “that’d make you, what, a pre-teen still? maybe next time you go visit her, you can ask her for your allowance to go buy parachute pants at the mall.”

“so she rebuilt?” felix interrupts. “or did she move?”

“she and my father moved, but she’s in the assisted-living side of a nursing home now,” jack’s mother says to felix. “she was lucky to live through that whole ordeal. she’s always been hard-headed, that woman, even back then, thinking she could ignore the warnings on tv. you ought to listen to those too, stranger.” she levels him with a pointed look.

“she stayed behind?” felix asks. “why?”

“hell if i know,” she says, lifting her glass to take a delicate sip of lemonade. “maybe you could tell me.”

jack watches felix shift slightly in one of their kitchen chairs, looking marginally less composed than usual. “there’s a word for it, but i don’t remember it. some people who are dissatisfied with their lives subconsciously want to be struck by disaster. if they feel trapped by routine or social convention, they might think they’d be relieved from obligation if everything was taken from them. it’s sort of like  _fight club_ , right?  _it’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything_.”

jack isn’t sure if the grimace felix tacks on after his unsettling theory is natural or if it’s something he’s putting on to avoid offending jack’s mother by implying that her own mother could have struggled with such dark thoughts. when jack glances over at his mother, her face is drawn. she’s staring deeply into her glass of lemonade as though it's a crystal ball into the past and she's hoping to get her answers from it. jack doesn’t like seeing his mother so unsure of herself.

“if you’re aiming for a movie she’s actually seen,” jack says, wanting to break the tension, “i’d suggest  _gone with the wind_ or  _casablanca_.”

“of all the  _craiglist_ ads in all of the forums, in all of the site, and he clicks onto mine,” felix says, looking despairingly off into the distance and squinting his eyes like he's remembering a time when jack broke his heart. jack would roll his eyes if felix were actually looking at him.

“what a romantic premise for a film,” jack’s mother says, and jack is wondering if anyone would notice if he left the room before he dies of embarrassment. surely felix isn’t trying to tell jack’s mother that they met through a _gay dating forum_. surely he’s not trying to flirt with jack in front of his  _mother_. if he is, jack will have no choice  _but_ to move to _omaha_ , from the humiliation alone.

felix dramatically turns to jack and squeezes his eyes shut like he’s holding back tears. “you’re tearing me apart, jack!” he cries, slamming his fist down onto jack’s kitchen table. “do you understand life?  _do_ you?”

“how does he come up with these things?”

jack puts his face into his hands and groans. transitioning seamlessly from referencing a critically-acclaimed forties movie to a modern movie so terrible that most people assumed it was a joke is something jack is sure shouldn’t even be legal. he bets roger ebert is rolling over in his grave just knowing that somebody somewhere had the audacity to speak about them in the same breath, as if they were of equal stature. “i think we’re better off not knowing.”

* * *

“he’s a dick,” jack says, fully aware he’s contributing little to the conversation outside of childish digs. the urge to push felix’s buttons is just too good to pass up. it might be the equivalent of pigtail-pulling in grade school, but jack never pulled anyone’s pigtails in school, so he has to make up for it some time.

“he’s a dick with millions of subscribers,” cory says, like he’s starstruck, though jack knows cory doesn’t care about anything his girlfriend doesn’t care about, and probably hasn't looked any further into felix’s _youtube_ channel than to see how popular it was. "he's a dick who probably feels damn proud of himself." 

jack turns to felix, wanting to poke at him some more. “so, how _does_ a dick worth millions feel?”

“you could find out,” felix says, and jack is about to reach over and knock his hand into felix's shoulder for the lewd suggestion until he notices cory looking at felix approvingly, nodding along supportively to the idea, and jack realizes that felix is saying that jack should make videos _himself_. “you’re a hundred times more natural in front of a camera than me - you’d have them eating out of the palm of your hand.”

“just like the girls do come rodeo season,” cory says while throwing a conspiratory smile in jack’s direction, like he thinks the three of them are going to bond over picking up chicks. jack could think of a dozen things he’d rather be doing than discussing how he picks up girls in front of felix, who would be sure to pick at jack’s past relationship like a scab if he found out why they’d split up.

“oh, yeah?” felix asks, unfortunately looking very absorbed in the conversation. “what works?”

“well, it's not so much what jack _says_ as how he _reacts_. ya’ll tourists love a good ole _‘ride ‘em like a rodeo’_ pick-up line,” cory says, cracking an imaginary whip in the air. “ya’ll try one every time on us locals like we haven’t heard them before. doesn't mean they don't work on jack, though.”

felix looks sidelong at jack, smirking. “giddy-up, jack,” he says, gesturing towards his own lap. “it’s rodeo time.”

jack goes pink, refusing to think of how warm felix’s lap really looks. “fuck off.”

“okay, okay!” felix says, getting up from his bar stool. “i’m going to go hunt down that other bartender since _ya’ll_ don’t want to do your job and serve me. i’m going to leave a nasty _yelp_ review after this.”

jack resolutely does not think about what a nasty _yelp_ review of felix’s lap would read like - ' _it was a warm, inviting place to go. it offered an attentive greeter',_ jack thinks, imagining sitting on felix’s hard-on, ' _and great service!_  ' countless porn clips jack’s ex-girlfriend had tried to show him about men servicing cock bombard jack’s brain. the split-second he pictures sitting on felix’s face for, felix’s beard rough against his thighs, is already enough to know that he’s going to have trouble meeting felix’s eyes. _'will come again! five stars!'_  jack can picture his come splattering across felix’s face. he can picture felix’s mouth raising off of jack’s cock with spit smeared over his bottom lip and chin.

jack swallows hard and tries to avert felix’s eyes as felix moves to stand from his bar stool. it’s suddenly feeling stiflingly hot in here. jack would be tugging on the collar of his shirt right now if he’d worn a button-up like he wears to church service. felix looks at him, towering over him with jack still on his bar stool. the air between them feels thicker, like it’s trying to suffocate jack. felix can’t know what jack is thinking, yet his eyes are dark, his bottom lip shiny from his beer, and jack forgets how to breathe for a moment. by the time jack remembers to exhale, felix has already walked away.

“sucka,” cory says, breaking jack out of his stupor and making a _psshing_ sound in disbelief, “if my girl looked at me like _that_ , i’d be bringing her home early tonight. catch my drift, homie?”

jack feels his face color. “it’s not _like_ that, man.”

“it’s _not_?” cory asks. he sticks out his hand and pokes at jack’s chin. “you’ve got some drool right here, young boy.”

jack glares, shoving away cory’s hand. “i couldn’t bring felix home, anyway. my folks aren’t very fond of him.”

cory sets down his mug of beer, which smacks loudly against the splintered wooden table, looking at jack with exasperation. “it’s been a while since the barn saw any action, right?”

“felix isn’t some spring-break slut, cory,” jack says, unsure if he’s saying it to ward off cory’s suggestive comments or if he’s just trying to vainly defend felix’s honor.

“aw,” felix says teasingly, his arm suddenly resting easily on the back of jack’s bar stool. “that’s so sweet, jack. what did i miss?”

“nothing,” jack says with what he hopes is a tinge of finality to his voice.  

“we were talking about the barn jack’s dad built when we were kids. they used to have horses, but now it’s just jack’s hiding spot for when his mom and stepdad try to track him down for church.” _well, so much for finality._

“oh, really?” felix asks, “sounds like a cool place to film.”

“ _shit_ , dude,” cory says, pretending to have a lightbulb moment, swatting at jack’s chest with the back of his hand and ignoring jack’s noise of protest. “yeah! ya’ll should check it out. light some candles and film tonight - it’ll be real spooky.”  

 _light some candles,_ _he says,_ jack thinks with an inward groan. _smooth, cory._ what kind of vibe is jack giving off to where his childhood best friend thinks jack is able to return felix’s feelings for him? cory has only known him to crush on girls - this is ridiculous. felix gestures for jack to hop off his stool to leave with him and places a guiding hand on the small of jack’s back. jack can hear cory snickering as jack trips over himself, temporarily having been rendered unable to move like a stunned video game character who’s run headlong into a wall.

* * *

it’s raining _hard_ when they get to the car - raining so hard that when felix turns his windshield wipers on the highest setting, it doesn’t improve visibility of the road at _all_. if someone were to tell jack that they were driving straight into the flood that god created to drown out all the sinners after saving noah and his ark, jack would believe them.

the thing about the backroads in _burwell_  is that only half of them are paved, and even the ones that  _are_ paved probably haven't been touched-up since they were laid down decades ago. potholes are to be expected and jack knows where each and every single one is in town, but that only helps when he can see anything through his windshield besides a torrential downpour. even with felix driving well under the speed limit, they seem to hit every available pothole, and the waves of water that surge up and over felix’s car would be a surfer’s wet dream were they happening in the ocean.

they’re probably only five miles from jack’s place, traveling with felix’s tires twisting erratically, stupidly, and often sideways, like a snail slipping through it’s own trail of slime, when jack stops white-knuckling it. he’s been gripping the underside of his seat for the whole ride, trying to hide his fear from felix, who looks like he’s never concentrated on anything more fiercely in his life. jack thinks this might be the only time since meeting felix that felix’s posture hasn't been lax and reeking heavily of carelessness, which has always made jack want to cry with jealousy.

jack lets himself exhale shakily as his street comes into view, but only just barely. one thing is certain: jack won’t be able to pull out of his own driveway tomorrow to meet felix at his motel. his front yard tends to cake up in mud whenever it rains like this, which means his car has been sitting here sinking into the mud for hours now.

felix’s windshield wipers are making pitiful squelching sounds like a hurt animal as they keep a steady, crawling pace down the street. jack is halfway to unbuckling his seatbelt as jack’s house approaches when the tires jerk suddenly over a pothole. jack knows he should have warned felix about it, but he’d been too busy thinking of how to delicately advise felix to wait out the storm before leaving for his motel in a way that wouldn't sound like he thinks felix doesn't have enough experience driving in storms to make it. maybe he and felix really _will_  wind up settling into the barn tonight to film, to set up candles, and tell ghost stories until the morning.

most car accidents happen close to home - jack had read that in a packet when he’d gone through driving school. he’d been sixteen and his instructor had also been one of the town’s postal workers. he’d thought that must have been misinformation at the time - how could you get into an accident driving the same path you’d been down every day since you were born? wouldn’t you have memorized all the bumps in the road by then?

they’re hydroplaning - jack knows this. felix is obviously trying to steer them away from all the trees alongside the road without wanting to hit the brakes and risk launching them through the windshield, for which jack is eternally grateful. it’s strange how he's gone from being so terrified to get into an accident to so at peace with the prospect of it. the whole situation feels bizarrely familiar. maybe that's because it's just like his dream and dreams don't have the power to hurt people. only, jack can feel pain shooting up his arm when they swerve and jack roughly bangs up against the passenger-side door. jack realizes that just because he didn't see the car make impact with the tree in his dream does't mean they aren't about to crash. the view out the windshield while the car is swerving is identical to his dream, like he’s looking at a movie reel. then, he’s reaching across felix to turn the wheel sharply to the right.

there’s mud where the dirt road meets jack’s dirt driveway, thick like driving straight into quicksand. felix doesn’t even need to step on the brakes to get his car to stop. he must still have his foot on the gas pedal, though, out of shock, because his front tires squeal with the effort they’re making to unearth themselves from the mud, but they’re going nowhere fast. jack is still running on pure anxiety, turning around in his seat to make sure that felix’s back tires are off the road, not that these backroads get the kind of traffic to where another car would likely ram them from behind.

felix turns to look at him, his back still pinched tight like a violin string. “we almost hit that tree.”

“yeah,” jack says, nodding like felix is talking about something as benign as the weather, which he supposes felix is.

“you just-” felix starts to say, then he loses his words, and makes a noise from deep within his throat, like there’s a frog stuck in it. jack is afraid that felix is about to cry from the stress and is completely unsure of how to deal with that. “how did you know that would work?”

jack shakes his head. “i didn’t - i just knew what wouldn’t.”

felix stares at him uncomprehendingly.

“i dreamed this,” jack admits weakly.

jack watches several thoughts pass through felix’s head, each one written clearly across his face. first is bewilderment, which seems to render felix of incapable of doing anything other than blinking stupidly at jack. he looks completely dumbfounded, like he’s being forced to reevaluate his entire comprehension of how the world works. his hands are still clenched tightly around the steering wheel, like he’s still in fight-or-flight mode.

“so you really _are_ psychic,” felix says in disbelief.

jack lets out a rough laugh. “good one, _chemtrailchris_.”

“how are you not freaking out right now?” felix asks, finally unclenching one hand from the wheel to run through his hair.

“whatever happened to _‘destruction is inevitable - being afraid is a choice’_?”

“i was wrong,” felix says, slowly. “it’s not inevitable. you just prevented us from crashing.”

“are you angry?” jack asks. he thinks of meeting felix, how it’d seemed like he’d wanted to toe the line between witnessing disasters and actually being involved in them firsthand. had jack just taken an experience away from felix that felix would have wanted? would they have not even been hurt if jack had allowed them to hit that tree? jack had woken up before he'd been able to see what happened _after_ the crash. is jack just too sensitive, too afraid of taking risks for his own good? did felix want to hit that tree, just to see what would happen? did he _want_ to be in danger?

 _“what?”_ felix asks.  

“if we’d crashed,” jack says carefully, praying felix isn’t _this_ much of an adrenaline junkie, “you’d have lost your footage, your camera equipment, everything. you hate your job. you’d have to start over. if we’d crashed, you might have seen the world burn.”

felix is leaning over the center console and grabbing jack’s face then, making jack’s hands come up from his lap, flailing like a fish out of water. felix is trying to kiss him, but his seatbelt locks like his car thinks it might need to expel the airbags. jack’s seatbelt is digging into his chest, holding him back from something good the way _burwell_ always seems to. it’s as if everything in town is sentient, even the vehicles, and are conspiring to keep him from going after what he wants.

jack watches felix unbuckle his seatbelt and then he’s moving to pull jack closer to him by the back of his neck, a sturdy pressure there that’s more welcome than the insistent pressure of the seatbelt that has jack wrangling around in his seat. he tries to dislodge the thing from his fucking throat without pulling back too far from felix. with the soft press of felix’s mouth, jack feels a warm wave of pleasure run through him, like drinking hot chocolate too fast, and not being bothered by the burn of it. felix’s hands are warm on him, cupping his face like he thinks jack is especially fragile.

“i don’t storm-chase because i want to experience disaster. storms might cause destruction, but they’re not inherently evil. they’re not operating with intent to cause harm - they’re just  _storms_. they’re a product of such a specific set of circumstances that when they actually happen, it’s a miracle of nature. car accidents aren’t  _miracles_. imagine if storms could be predicted with total clarity. nobody would ever get hurt from them,” felix says, pulling away from jack. “you can  _do_ that. you’ve proven there’s more to storms than science, more to life than inevitables. you stopping us from crashing is a miracle, just like dry lightning. it shouldn’t be possible, but it  _is_.  _you’re_ a miracle,” he says, sounding revenant.  

jack lets out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. his brain has gone fuzzy and he can’t remember why crashing would have been bad in the first place, not if he would have felt as warm with his world burning as he did when felix had just kissed him. jack moves towards felix, ignoring his seatbelt tightening in retaliation, to chase felix’s mouth.

after a beat goes by where felix seems too surprised that jack has taken initiative to respond himself, felix kisses back enthusiastically, licking into jack’s mouth and making jack’s body flush warm again. jack is out of his mind from the residual stress of the near-accident and the weight of felix’s hand back at the nape of his neck, which feels like a promise to call the shots. jack has never felt so turned on in his life, just from somebody else leading. he’s unaware of how he’s crawling over the center console until he hears the click of felix undoing jack’s seatbelt for him, is halfway into felix’s lap when he regains some semblance of cognition, and loses it again when felix starts kissing his neck. he could laugh at how he’d predicted sitting on felix’s hard-on if he wasn’t so hard himself and so completely unsure of how to feel about it. then, felix is tugging jack closer by his waist so they’re pressed together through their jeans, and jack is gasping into felix’s mouth. jack is coming so hard and so fast that his head spins with it, felix pressing his forehead to jack’s shoulder and snapping his hips up until he comes just as fast, and jack thinks he could get hard again just from the feeling of being manhandled like that.

jack doesn’t even know how they get to the barn, barely aware of the walk over there except for the way his boots stick in the mud when felix stops him in his front yard, in front of jack’s kitchen windows, to kiss jack again where his folks could see if they were standing there. jack knows they’re probably asleep already, but he thinks he would have let felix kiss him right there for far too long even if his folks had been standing there, too full of pent-up energy to care. he's pulling himself up by gripping onto each side of felix's open jacket, throwing one arm around felix's neck to kiss him harder. 

they’re soaked from the rain that’s still pouring, sounding angry as it pelts down onto the roof. jack has the presence of mind to start lighting the candles like cory had suggested, halfway to having normal brain function, and is even considering filming something with felix when felix comes up behind him and touches him like he owns him. jack is whirling around to meet him with another kiss and figuratively saying _fuck it._

felix slips out of his bomber jacket and unzips jack’s coat for him, which shouldn’t be nearly as sexy as it is. they fall backwards onto jack’s makeshift bed, the place where jack often lounges while ditching church. there’s navajo blankets with fringe and retro crochet ones with god-awful floral patterns that his mother probably got when she was a teenager laid out in heaps on the bales of hay in jack’s favorite stall. jack tugs felix closer, feeling that his tee shirt has gotten drenched from the rain, the cotton now clinging to his chest and emphasizing how the cold has hardened his nipples. jack knows that he has goosebumps running up his arms and he can only imagine how cold felix must be to have had his jacket unzipped while they were outside. he helps to yank felix's shirt over his head like a good friend might do, but felix leans down and kisses jack with more tongue than a friend probably should. jack has his arms around felix’s neck, one hand pausing to appreciate how felix’s bare shoulder feels when he thinks of how misguided he was in expecting that he would only be felix’s friend, and wonders if felix expected this would happen.

“bet you never thought this would be your fate when you posted that  _craigslist_ ad,” jack says, making eyes around the room to demonstrate how weird it feels to be rolling around in the hay with another dude, and wondering if it's any less weird for felix.

“better,” felix says, shaking out his hair and sending rain droplets onto jack’s face, and jack’s heart breaks at the thought of felix leaving town soon.

* * *

felix is bare-chested and has tiny straws from the bales of hay stuck in his hair and even some in his beard. he’s sleeping on his stomach, face pressed into one of jack’s navajo blankets. jack’s never been with anyone who sleeps like this - he wonders how felix  _breathes_. if he hadn’t figured out that felix didn’t believe in monsters by now, he would know by seeing this. he sleeps like nobody on the face of the planet could rouse him if their life depended on it, sleeps like the kind of guy who never felt the need to curl his legs up in bed when he was a kid to keep the monsters from grabbing them. there’s something comforting in felix’s self-assuredness, like felix truly believes nothing can harm him if he doesn't give anyone permission to. 

“what’s this?” slim asks, standing in the doorway to the horse stall, arms crossed. 

jack can hope that this thing with felix will lead somewhere, though he can't say he knows exactly what it means to felix, but he  _does_ know one thing. “ _this_ is none of your business,” jack says, narrowing his eyes. he turns so his elbow grazes felix’s chest, hoping to wake him up. jack sees his shirt rumpled-up on the floor and grabs it hastily, pulling it over his head.

his movements must be enough to alert felix that something is happening, but  _alert_ is not the word jack would use to describe felix’s state. he’s just made a muffled sound into the blankets, a groan of displeasure from being woken up. he twists in the blankets over him, one slipping down to his navel. jack turns around on the bales, grimacing as several straws beneath him stab him in the side, to quietly warn felix of his stepfather’s presence, resisting the urge to pull the blankets up from felix's hips to hide under them.

felix is looking at him behind bleary eyes, blinking like he’s trying to get accustomed to the light that’s filtering in between the slats of wood in the walls. it occurs to jack that felix might not be able to see that someone is behind him, what with jack propped up on his elbows and laying on his side.

felix seems to finally realize where he is, looking first at the mess of quilts and throw blankets over them, then up to the ceiling of the barn and it’s many wooden beams, then his eyes finally sweep back down to jack. the corner of his lip twists up, his eyebrow quirking. “come here often?” he asks in a raspy tone, managing to look only slightly embarrassed of his joke, and breaking out into a smile when jack fails to stop himself from snorting.

“boy, you’d do good to leave before i involve the law.”

felix is wrong; you don't have to give someone permission to hurt you. whether jack gives permission to him or not, slim will still throw felix out, and it will still hurt jack. felix's self-assuredness is about to dissipate and jack doesn't want to be responsible for it. jack knows he should have anticipated something like this happening - _burwell_ would never let him have anything long enough to settle into it and trust it's longevity. it's like buying an empty house, furnishing and decorating it, and having it knocked over just as it starts to feel like a home. 

felix jerks, his eyes widening. he looks back to jack and jack attempts an apologetic look, wishing he’d had the foresight to set an alarm on his phone, or at least leave a note in his kitchen letting his mother and stepfather know he planned to sleep out in the barn as he sometimes did, or done literally anything else to prevent this.

jack heaves himself off the stacked bales with a heavy sigh, hunching over and scrubbing his face with his hands. somewhere deep within him, he knows that if slim had walked into the barn when jack was in high school and seen jack with his girlfriend, though they'd been underage, slim wouldn’t have cared. jack tries not to dwell on the thought, doesn’t like feeling angry so early in the morning that he’s not yet even gotten dressed or eaten breakfast.

felix is awkwardly turning around to look for his shirt behind him, but finds his jacket instead. jack watches him hurriedly pull his bomber jacket on over his bare chest and walk over to where jack’s stepfather stands. instead of looking at slim, he passes a look to jack, lips pressed tightly together like he has several things he’d like to say. his hand reaches out and touches the doorway, using his hand to spring himself out of the stall before he says something that could make the situation worse.

there's a heavy silence for what feels like a century before slim speaks, leaving jack to sit on the bales of hay feeling like he's a frog being dissected by slim's scalpel.“what do you think you’re doing, son?” slim finally asks, shaking his head. “he’s going to leave when the documentary is finished, and where will you be? still here with your mother and i.”

jack knows this. he’s thought about it a lot. he’s just going to have to give felix so much material that the documentary doesn’t end on schedule. felix hasn’t brought up his time constraint in weeks. there has to be a reason for it and jack refuses to believe it’s only because felix planned to wear him down and then leave the second he'd gotten what he'd wanted from jack. felix hasn't seemed like he's been dying to leave since the first day jack had known him when he'd acted like the town wasn't worth exploring any further. felix has been happy here and it might be because of jack.

slim walks closer and leans back against the wall like the barn is his property, though the house and land is in his mother’s name, and nobody has bothered with the barn for years - nobody besides jack. “he’ll be gone and you’ll still here in this town with the people who you’ve been portraying as yahoos. you’re ruining your reputation here for a stranger.”

“he’s not a stranger,” jack stresses, as though the thought is preposterous. he’s spent nearly every second with felix since he came. felix knows more about jack than friends he’s had for years.

“he knows everything about you and your town, but what do you know about him? just because you’re not a stranger to him doesn’t mean he’s not one to you.”

“i know enough to trust him to be here,” jack says, looking around the barn. he knows slim will understand what jack means. slim had been around for long enough during jack’s formidable teenage years to know that jack was protective over the barn, considered it an extension of his father, and had used to put up a stink even when the kid who used to mow their grass for them would get too close to it.

“son, if you bring him back here again, i’m going to have him arrested for trespassing.” slim looks at jack carefully as he speaks, probably knows jack is going to react badly. his thumb is hooked into the belt loop of his faded jeans. jack is shocked that slim would dare to assert that the barn could _ever_ belong to him. “the sheriff will have no problem taking him down to the station.”

“i’m not your son,” jack says bluntly, pushing past slim, and out of the barn that he'd worked so hard to keep pure and full of good memories, which now feels tainted, like a photo album full of yellowing photos where each and every face in them had become blurry and distorted. coming back into the barn again after this will feel like trying to put back together something broken.

* * *

jack has always had an active imagination. his mother always told him not to trust his dreams, that all little kids have scary dreams. maybe she had been wrong, though. jack wasn’t sure if she’d been telling him that so he wouldn’t grow up with the enormous burden of knowing he could theoretically misinterpret a premonition as a normal dream and neglect to save a life, like he’d done with his dad. he'd hoped that she had done it to keep him sane, instead of doing it to keep him ignorant. maybe if he’d found out who he really was sooner he wouldn’t have had to spend his whole adolescence questioning why he felt so different from everybody else in town. maybe if he’d found out who he really was sooner he would have tried to trigger the premonitions to see if he could make a habit of saving people’s lives. was his mother helping to keep him safe and grounded or was she trying to keep him from fleeing the coop?

the other question that looms over his head like the rain clouds that he’s started dreaming of again, heavy and saturated with humid western air, is why the dreams have come back after such a long absence. the only thing in his life that’s changed recently is - well, felix. jack would like to sit back and chalk it all up to fate, that his future is something he doesn't have any control over, and therefore can't be blamed for it something goes poorly, but it feels wrong to do so. it would be hypocritical to blame everything on fate when his mere dreams proved that jack can change the future, making _fate_ seem unrealistic when confronted by choice and free will. felix is right to think that being afraid is a choice, but not because destruction is inevitable. being afraid is a choice because, if jack can prevent something horrible from happening, there's no need to be afraid. 

the only thing in his life that's changed is the introduction of _one_ person. it shouldn't have this kind of impact on him, but jack feels like the  _toy story_ pull-string toy he'd had as a little boy whenever felix is around. jack's cowboy doll woody would burst out with funny little things when you pulled his string - jack's favorite had always been _'you're my favorite deputy'._ jack feels much the same way, that he's got no control over what comes out of his mouth. all felix has to do is pull him slightly in one direction and he starts babbling like a kid who’s had too much sugar, revealing truths about his town, his family, and himself that he’d had no intention of revealing. sometimes jack is appreciative of what his attention-deficit disorder has done for him. without it, how could he multi-task at his job so efficiently? at the same time, it’s given him a lack of filter that is proving to betray jack’s sense of dignity at every turn.

there’s some things that jack would have liked to have maybe not told felix - like that if he were into guys, felix would probably be his ideal type, and that was something he’d told felix after barely knowing him for _ten minutes_. he'd have maybe liked to have not made such a fuss over what felix had worn to meet his mother, showing felix that it was important for her to like him. he's damn lucky felix hadn't called him on that. he must have been too busy tripping over himself apologizing to jack's mother to stop and ask why it mattered so much to jack that she like him in the first place.

he'd liked felix so much already, before he'd even kissed him. at first jack had thought he liked felix so much because he was merely a physical representation of what jack longed for - a career path that locals around these parts would never understand, but one that jack nevertheless found intriguing, not to mention felix having an unbothered, confident aura that made jack wish he cared less of what people thought of him. 

the last time jack can remember having deja vu was when he was just a boy, swaddled in his sheets with all the planets on them, cartoonish and nerdy. he’s sure felix would love to hear about them, but the thought of telling felix about his set of sheets, even ones he’s longed since owned, makes his stomach flutter. thoughts of felix and he sharing a bed flood his mind and are immediately washed away with jack’s mounting anxieties. the dreams also used to make his stomach flutter, but in a different way altogether.

when he’d been a boy, he’d had frequent dreams of terrible accidents, almost all involving his dad. his father, sean, had been a roofer all his life. his parents had both thought that jack had these ‘nightmares’ because roofers were known to get hurt on the job more so than other men in town. they’d assumed jack had heard a horror story somewhere along the way, maybe in church or maybe even on the local news. in reality, jack wouldn’t have called these dreams _nightmares_ at all - they never felt the way nightmares felt. waking from a nightmare felt scary only until his brain realized nothing was wrong and danger wasn’t actually imminent.

all jack’s dreams - they posed real threats. he’d wake his dad in the middle of the night to tell him to stay away from his coworker hank that day at work and his dad would come home and say that hank had slipped on ice layered over a roof and almost taken him down too, just trying to grab onto the nearest body for purchase. hank had broken his leg and that’d been considered getting off _easy_ in his dad’s mind. there were dozens of instances like that for years to come, but his mother would always rush into his room when he’d yelled for her. each time she'd tell him that everything was merely a coincidence, that he was too old to still be so upset by nightmares.

it was the reason jack had never told his dad about the last premonition jack had dreamt since felix had arrived in town. jack had been twelve and had woken from a dream where his father had fallen from a roof in the middle of a heavy rainstorm and been paralyzed. needless to say, his father had been comatose for a while in the nearest hospital, which had been out of town, before his body had just given out. he’d never mentioned his dream to his mother, knowing she wouldn’t believe him, and that it’d just make her grieving process last longer. he also didn’t want to be forced into therapy, so he’d said nothing, and eventually settled with the belief as he grew older that his dream really had just been a coincidence.

the priest felix had interviewed had said that townsfolk used to whisper about the ladies who went to church by day and worshipped the occult by night. he’d told felix that their children were born as seers, born into a body of water that wasn’t natural. _ironic,_ jack thought, _that the reservoir was in a national park, a place protected for it's naturalness._

 _“seers in mythology are often tied to someone they view as a personal hero and their visions are said to be tied to the fate of this person,”_ the priest had said, in his strange, neutral tone. jack hadn’t been able to tell whether the priest believed this or not. now he’s wondering if the priest just hadn’t wanted to voice his true opinion with jack present, that he suspected or had heard that jack’s mother was one of those very women who had been involved in occult practice. it would make jack some sort of seer. it would make -

it would make felix his _hero_.

did jack subconsciously think that felix was going to save him and take him away from this place and, in return, did jack feel that he needed to prevent any harm from coming to felix? the dreams certainly would point to that. it would have also made his father his hero as a child. did his mother know all of this already? had she been in denial all this time that the occult ritual had worked? was she disapproving of felix because jack had found someone who had the potential to take jack away from _burwell_? or was jack just absolutely crazy, having spent too much time entertaining ridiculous theories to form a rational explanation?

jack has a dream that night, after spending hours tossing and turning, that the strong winds during the coming storm knock down one of the willow trees in his front yard. it's one of the huge, billowing ones that surround his father’s barn. jack had used to sit in front of that tree when he was a kid, reading comics until his dad would bring one of the horses out and call for jack to come over and help him brush out her mane.

in his dream, the tree’s trunk has split either from being struck with lightning or from crumpling after the wind knocked it down. it’s bark is exposed, vibrant in color, unlike the outside of the trunk. the bark from the inside of the tree is unblemished and untainted by the outside world, despite probably being ancient. jack thinks it's like seeing a photo of an organ donor’s lungs who’d never puffed on a single cigarette all their life, the beauty of the bark preserved even in death. half of the enormous, split trunk has melded with the barn, stuck inside one of the walls with some taller branches having caved in a portion of the barn’s roof.

when jack wakes up, he feels his eyes welling up at the thought of the barn being damaged. he bets slim will want to tear it down once that happens. he could try to have somebody local come and chop that tree down before the storm can cause it to fall onto the barn, but slim would never believe jack saw that happening in his dreams, and would complain about the cost even if he did. his mother had never shared the strange stories of jack’s childhood dreams with slim, having met him when jack was no longer having them, and jack suspects she had wanted to pretend jack had never struggled with them to begin with.

once the barn is destroyed, jack knows he’ll have little to no reason to stick around _burwell_. nostalgia for his relationship with his dad is not a good enough reason to stick around. he certainly won't stay just to have his choices in the company he keeps be criticized by his stepfather. it isn't fair in the slightest - slim would never understand the pain of feeling fundamentally different from everyone in town and would therefore never feel the need to escape. he would never get the urge to dive into his truck and just drive until he ran out of gas.

* * *

jack gets out of bed feeling completely directionless in life, which happens often, but never with this sick feeling of hopelessness. his mood doesn’t lift when he realizes only slim is eating breakfast at the kitchen table, his mother nowhere to be found. he suppresses a sigh, takes a muffin from the kitchen counter, and sinks into the chair across from slim.  

“big storm coming later today,” slim says from over the newspaper, not even bothering to look up at jack. maybe he's too disgusted by catching jack in the barn with felix to look him in the eye. “you probably shouldn’t go galavanting around town with that punk - people will think you’re looking for trouble.”

jack feels something angry twisting around in his stomach. he thinks of how lucky slim is to have everyone in town be so accepting of his relationship with jack’s mom. if his mother had remarried twenty years earlier, everyone would have spoken poorly about slim for going after a widow, and would have probably called his mother a whore for not adhering to the unspoken rule that women should respect their deceased husbands by living the rest of their lives out alone. jack’s mere friendship with felix had caused drama in town and already had the capability to ruin his relationship with his mother and stepfather before they'd acted on their feelings. jack couldn’t possibly imagine how people would react if he and felix were known publicly to be involved more intimately than that. slim is too damn lucky for his own good and maybe that’s why jack can’t stop the words that slip out of his mouth.

“you’d better park your truck in the barn,” jack says, pulling his mother’s _pottery barn_ issue over to himself with feigned indifference. “it’ll get covered in mud otherwise.”

slim looks up at him, looking surprised. “good call, son. i was going to put a tarp down, but i reckon the barn will keep it safer.”

jack feels another sharp twist of anger coming from somewhere deep within himself at slim’s usage of the word _son_ again, a foreign feeling to him since he never allows himself to fixate on his negative emotions. he’s always trying to put on a smile, be polite, and appease everyone else. he’s starting to think that he’s done enough of that shit to last him a lifetime. “it absolutely will.”

“what makes you so sure?”

“call it a hunch,” jack says, smiling ruefully from behind his mother’s magazine.

* * *

felix tries not to feel disappointed when jack texts him and tells him that he’s not coming to meet him at the motel and that he won’t be going to the _calamus reservoir_ with him either. he doesn’t give felix a reason why and felix is starting to think it’s because jack regrets what happened in the barn between them. he never thought he’d have jack like _that_ , in the way he’d wanted him. he’d been so nervous about scaring jack off in that moment and so shocked at jack’s eagerness that felix had just jumped at the chance. it hadn’t occurred to him that jack could have been running on pure adrenaline and would experience his uncertainty _after_. jack had thought he’d wanted felix after a moment of fear that had inspired his body to react accordingly, had tried it out like some guys their age did, and was now suffering from buyer’s remorse.

the only problem is, felix is sort of falling in love with jack, and has been ever since jack had read him like an open book the first time they’d met. most everyone felix knows take his videos at face value and never stop to think about the possibility that they were satire. it’d been so easy spending time with jack because he’d never once had to convince him that he wasn’t the second-coming of david icke. in the time that would normally take felix just to convince someone he was interested in dating that he wasn’t insane, he’d already shared enough personal information with jack to either warrant marrying him, or killing him so he could never tell anyone who felix really was behind his aloof exterior - an idiot who would throw an entire investigation on the back-burner and risk pissing off his fans and ruining his livelihood just to wander around jack’s town vlogging like he were some _los angeles_ teenager trekking from  _the grove_ to the _santa monica_ beach everyday, like time was no concern. 

he’s thinking about sitting in the sand by the river in his hoodie and jeans to ponder all of his mistakes in life like a totally pretentious douchebag, and putting off taking stock footage of the reservoir altogether, when he sees a woman has apparently beat him to the punch. she’s sitting several yards away, wearing a sundress and a large-brimmed straw hat. her feet are bare, a pair of wedge heels sunken into the sand beside her. her back is towards felix, but her posture is awkwardly cramped, her arms encircling her knees. it reminds her of the way jack sometimes sits when he's feeling especially vulnerable, like in the church pew, when he'd sat like he'd wanted to take up as little space as humanly possible. there’s a discarded fishing pole also beside the woman, but no bait attached to it.

it’s then that felix realizes that it’s jack’s mother.

“i should have brought some bait,” felix says conversationally, hoping she’ll still be friendly towards him when jack isn’t around.

she turns to look over her shoulder with a concerned expression that seems to slightly relax when she sees him. he wonders who in town she'd been worried it'd be that she'd actually looked relieved to see _felix_. he's been under the impression since he met her at the church that she's well-liked. “from what the priest tells me, that’s what _you_ are.”

“oh, really?” felix asks, crossing his arms over his chest. what kind of bait felix is, he isn't sure he wants to find out. he has no idea what kind of conversations she must have had with the priest, but it doesn't sound like they went well. if she's not as liked in _burwell_ as felix believed her to be, maybe he has more in common with her than he had initially thought. 

she sighs heavily and pats the sand beside her. “sit down, stranger. we’ve got a lot to talk about.” once felix has reluctantly sat down, she gathers sand into her cupped hands and lets it trickle out slowly, like it would if it were inside an hourglass, before continuing, like she’s not quite sure of how to talk to him. “i’ve been thinking about your theory the past few days.”

“jack told you my thoughts on chemtrails?”

she smiles and it’s more than felix thinks he deserves for such a terrible attempt at derailing the conversation before it even begins. “sometimes it’s difficult to come to terms with someone’s true nature, especially when they’re family. growing up, my parents always seemed happy. it never entered my mind that she could have felt underwhelmed by marriage or with motherhood. it’s not such an easy thing to accept, that you weren’t enough to make your mother happy."

felix draws in a breath, looking away from her. it’s never been easy for him to comfort people when they're upset. he doesn’t think he should squeeze her shoulder or hug her like he might do with a friend, so he just sits there feeling guilty for causing her to question her childhood, but unable to take back what he said.

“so i never want jack to feel that way.”

felix meets her eyes and nods carefully. “that’s -  _yeah_.”

“what you explained, it worries me. he’s always suppressed his personality to make other people more comfortable. this town bores him - he could crave danger too someday, if he becomes even more bored. i’m sorry about before - i only meant that you’ve attracted a lot of attention since coming here - not much of it good.”

“i understand that you’re worried about how people will treat him,” felix says, unsure of what he can say that won’t be overstepping his bounds and unsure if they’re talking about jack’s sexuality, his uncanny predictions, or both.

“that’s just it,” she says quietly. “everything i’ve ever taught him was to keep people from treating him differently - for his nightmares, for being the only kid in town to not have a father, for losing his girlfriend over squabbles about who he’s attracted to.” she pauses to look off into the distance, away from felix, and felix knows he can’t ask what her what that means without betraying jack’s trust. “maybe he’s right and this place will never be kind to him.” she looks forlorn, but felix knows lying to her about his opinion and advising her to continue telling jack to stay in  _burwell_ would only be doing a disservice to jack.

“it’s not your fault,” felix settles on, wanting to find the middle-ground between being kind to her and defending jack’s right to live his own life, “that they’re close-minded here.”

“they didn’t use to be,” she hedges, “believe me. you couldn’t imagine what they were like.”

felix finds himself wishing he’d thought to have asked her if he could film their conversation. he’s afraid that she’s implying something completely ludicrous - something that couldn’t possibly be true. “i can imagine.”

she smiles at him gently. “you’ve told me about your skepticism - you tell stories you don’t even believe.”

“first time for everything,” felix says, stretching his legs out and digging his heels into the sand to distract himself from his nerves, “even for skeptics to become believers.”

she purses her lips. “when you grow up in a city, you’re free to roam. you might find that underage drinking is as common as drinking legally.” she looks to felix, questioningly. felix nods again to assure her that it’s a fair assessment - he had plenty of time to explore  _omaha_ as a kid, sneaking into bars with fake ids nearly every weekend.

“in places like  _burwell_ ,” she says, “you’re never free to be a kid, not really. all eyes are on you, daring you to misbehave so they'll have a parent to criticize after church. you might look like a toddler, but you have to act like an adult. once you really  _are_ an adult, and you’ve never experienced living recklessly, you realize your time to be wild has passed. you’re freshly-married and desperate for some excitement before you resign to housewifely duties. maybe you meet the wrong people and make mistakes. you might turn away from god. you might spend the rest of your life regretting it and not knowing how to make your kid feel like they belong.”

felix watches her while holding his breath.  _is she talking about her mother or about herself? is she alluding to her mother’s decision to risk her life by staying in town to observe the tornado or - no, she can’t have had any involvement in those rituals, could she?_

 _it doesn’t matter_ , he decides. he’s no longer interested in delving into this conspiracy and unearthing all the trauma that’s buried beneath years of social niceties and all the effort put into building back up one’s reputation. it might not be felix’s concern in life to be well-liked, and it might not be jack’s anymore either, but it certainly is his mother’s. it clearly causes her distress to be disliked, and there's still an uphill battle for her if seeing the guy she thinks is trying to steal her son away from her is preferable to seeing someone actually _from_ _burwell_. felix knows that whether or not she _was_ part of some cult, she's still being punished for it, and felix isn’t going to brand her a pariah.

“you can want them to belong, but maybe  _they_ don’t want to belong. right, stranger?” she asks felix with a small smile, speaking once again about jack. felix knows, all at once, that she’s ready to let jack go.

* * *

felix drives in a haze back from the river, having not even bothered collecting stock footage. he’s heading to jack’s place, hoping jack’s stepfather won’t see him pull into the yard if he parks by the barn. after slamming the driver’s side door shut, he makes long, impatient strides to the barn. jack’s stepfather’s truck isn’t parked in the driveway like it’s been every time felix has been here. as he gets closer to the barn, he sees that it’s parked alongside the wall of the barn that’s collapsed unto itself, making felix worry for how jack is dealing with the collapse. he’s preparing to see jack evaluating the damage to the barn, or maybe even circling the vehicle inside, trying to see if the damage is extensive enough to warrant a trip to the junkyard. he’s sure that the worse off the truck is, the more upset his stepfather will be. there’s a thick branch jutting out through the windshield, another laying across the truck’s roof, having dented it badly. what he’s _not_ prepared for is the image of jack smiling nervously at felix from inside the barn, sitting on several bales of hay with a backwards baseball hat on.

 _“jesus fucking christ,”_ felix says as he broaches the doorway of the barn, looking towards the truck, “what a shame.”

jack gives him a funny look, with his lip quirked almost imperceptibly. “is it?”

felix balks. why wasn’t jack upset about the barn? or worried of what his stepfather would do when he saw the state of his truck? he looks to jack questioningly, but jack’s expression remains the same. he looks as though he’s challenging felix to reach a conclusion that felix isn’t sure he can reach. “you’re not upset,” felix says slowly.

“i had plenty of warning,” jack says.

felix frowns. “you _knew_ this would happen to the barn?”

jack isn't upset about the barn because he’d already seen it happen, already finished grieving before it’s demise had even occurred. felix supposes it’s too bad that jack’s stepfather doesn't have that kind of foresight. only, if jack had known this would happen, couldn’t he have stopped his stepfather from parking there? _shit._ had jack done this on purpose? what reason could he have even had? he barely knows what jack’s relationship with his stepfather is like. his only real interaction with the both of them had suggested that jack’s stepfather hadn’t exactly taken a liking to felix, had even gone so far as to have threatened him. _wait,_ felix thinks, _was jack playing god?_ should felix be morally opposed to that? he’s was too busy being flattered by the jack's ingenuity and the possible depth of jack’s feelings for him. _that's it, isn't it?_  this is some kind of grand romantic gesture.

“you little _shit_ ,” felix says in disbelief. “you really _do_ get away with murder here, _don’t_ you?”

jack shrugs. "i don't know what you're talking about." 

"you did this," felix says with an impressed little laugh.

“prove it,” jack says brazenly, tipping his chin up like he's proud of himself.

he’s still sitting on top of several stacked bales of hay, his legs kicking against the bales with nervous energy. the distance from his feet to the ground is comical, reminding felix of _the princess and the pea_ , and the way the princess slept on dozens of mattresses, all stacked so steeply atop one another that she slept among the clouds. he watches jack fiddle with his bangs, which are poking out from the opening in the back of his baseball cap. it’s not until felix’s knees are brushing up against jack’s shins that he sees what’s making jack so nervous. he’s got two sturdy-looking suitcases, old-fashioned and leather, leaning up against the hay.

“what are those for?” felix asks, biting his bottom lip.

“well, i got a lead about something that would make for a good documentary.”

“oh, yeah?”

jack grins, feet kicking back once more against the bales. “yeah, there’s apparently a monster from _omaha,_ did you know? it's, like, six feet tall, really hairy, and blonde.”

“oh my god,” felix says with a rough laugh, his hand going to the back of jack’s neck, knuckles brushing under the brim of jack’s baseball cap. “that sounds so familiar! i'm getting a raging clue right now!” he manages between laughter, then ducks down to press a close-mouthed kiss to jack’s mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> zodiacmac.tumblr.com


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